Oddly enough, when I watched this movie for the first time on late-night AMC, I didn't think it was all that bad. But now that I think back, I cannot find a single thing about it that could actually be described as "good," other than the fact that it made me laugh. And for anyone at IABBBBM, that should be recommendation enough.

I missed the first twenty-five minutes or so, but guessing from later events, the story begins with Dr. Cal Meacham, your run-of-the-mill handsome nuclear scientist hero, ordering a small airplane from a catalog. The plane arrives, and Cal gets in and flies away. Then the plane goes haywire and takes him to a place in a rural area of its own accord. He gets out and is met by a woman, Dr. Ruth Adams, whom he is sure he once went swimming with at a conference in Vermont but who pretends not to know him.

Ruth takes him to a beautiful white house where he is introduced to the group of scientists living and working there. He is also introduced to Exeter, their leader, who has an abnormally high, lumpy forehead and white hair. Oddly enough, Exeter has an assistant named Braack, who also has an abnormally high, lumpy forehead and white hair, but no one seems to think this odd. All the scientists happen to be working on similar projects: transforming lead into radioactive isotopes of plutonium and uranium.

Now we reach the best part of this movie: the flagrant disregard for scientific principles. Even in the fifties, people knew better than to pretend that the ideas and machines in this movie were anything but plausible. And what makes it even worse is that at the center of each of the absurdities, there is a tiny kernel of authentic science buried under layers of silliness and ignorance. In a way, this is worse than simply ignoring science altogether. But in another way, it's better, because it had me laughing out loud.

For example, it is impractical (if not impossible) to turn lead into uranium in any kind of quantity even with today's massive particle accelerators. This is especially relevant considering the purpose for which the radioactive elements are needed: Exeter and Braack are aliens whose planet is in danger of being destroyed by their enemies, and they need a new source of nuclear energy to power the machines that protect their entire planet with some kind of "ionization sphere." Am I wrong in thinking that the amount of uranium needed to power a planet-wide protective sphere would be unbelievably huge? Wouldn't it take more energy to produce that much uranium from lead than you could possibly derive from the uranium itself?

But, let's return to the plot and examine some other alien inventions. Cal finds out about the aliens by talking to Ruth and another scientist who seems to be Ruth's love interest but isn't. Since they aren't sure about how friendly the aliens are, they want to talk in private. Unfortunately, Exeter has set up a videophone (with an inconvenient triangular screen) in every room and can spy on them. So they push a block of lead between themselves and the videophone and talk in peace, disregarding the fact that sound waves move around blocks of lead. But the alien videophone can see through lead, so Exeter watches anyway. Interestingly, this machine that can see through lead has problems seeing through more delicate things like human skin, so Exeter doesn't have to worry about seeing a group of walking skeletons chatting away. Later, Exeter gives away the see-through-lead secret to Cal by blasting a hole through that same block of lead with the videophone's built-in heat ray.

Cal, Ruth, and the Love Interest That Isn?t decide that they'd rather be elsewhere, so they run away from the house. They don't have to worry about taking any of the other scientists with them, because Exeter and Braack have turned them into walking zombies with their mind-control machine, and who wants to rescue zombies? To my everlasting regret, the mind-control machine was never shown; I'm sure it would have added to the absurdity of the movie immeasurably.

Unfortunately, Exeter has just received word from his home planet of Metaluna that the Earth scientist project must be packed up and moved home. He and Braack get into their flying saucer, blow up the house and the zombie scientists for no particular reason, and go after their wayward non-zombie scientists. Here we discover an interesting property of the heat ray: it causes its victims to disappear a split second before the puff of smoke goes up, signaling their demise. While this is undoubtedly an editing problem, it gave me no end of amusement. Love Interest gets evaporated, along with a stray scientist.

Cal and Ruth make it to a small landing strip where a single-engine plane in working condition just happens to be parked. They get in and fly away. However, Cal's bad plane luck continues, and the aliens catch them. Instead of blowing them up like the rest of their scientists, they use their multifunctional heat ray as a tractor beam.

Exeter explains to Cal and Ruth all about his planet's problems. He then introduces the best alien device ever: a machine which I'll call the Pressure Cooker. It seems that Metaluna's surface has a pressure about half again as great as that of Earth's surface. Exeter says that moving straight from Earth pressure to Metaluna pressure would kill them. He tells them to get into the Pressure Cooker and place their hands over the handgrips provided. He turns the machine on, and their hands involuntarity grip themselves around the hand grips. They struggle for a moment, and Exeter tells them not to worry -- that the hand grips are magnetized. What?! Since when do magnets attract human hands? Anyway, they are enclosed in glass tubes, and the glass tubes fill up with steam. Then the tubes open, and they are now "pressurized."

But wait a minute! There are only three tubes on the Pressure Cooker, and the flying saucer has a crew of about ten. (Where were the other crew members hiding on Earth? Only Braack and Exeter lived in the house.) We have pressurized and non-pressurized folk aboard at the same time: so which pressure is the saucer set to?

Anyway, after flying through space for an hour or so, they reach Metaluna, which is being viciously bombed by spacecraft-guided meteors from the enemy aliens. They land (the landing sequence is actually a fine piece of filmwork, considering the special effects technology of the time) and go to meet the Metalunan commander. The commander tells Exeter to zombiefy Cal and Ruth and set them to work on their alchemy project again. Exeter refuses, saying that zombiefication makes human scientists dumb. The commander insists.

Along the way to the mind-control machine, Exeter, Cal, and Ruth meet a man in a rubber suit with claws for hands. Exeter says that these are genetically altered creatures that the Metalunans use for cheap labor. He calls them "mute-ants." I couldn't tell whether this was a mispronunciation of "mutant" or a description of the creature. They were certainly mute, and they looked a little like ants.

About this point, things get sort of confusing. Exeter rebels against the commander and decides to take Cal and Ruth back to Earth. Meanwhile, the enemy meteors finally break down the last of the ionization sphere and start destroying the planet in earnest. The commander dies, and Exeter, Cal, and Ruth escape on the flying saucer while the whole planet begins to heat up from all the energy of the meteor impacts and turns into a SUN. About this point I rolled off the couch laughing and hurt myself.

In the end, Cal and Ruth make it home, and Exeter flies the saucer into the ocean to commit suicide. That's it. Apparently the whole point of this movie was for Cal to take a day trip on a flying saucer.

Rating: four turkeys. I recommend it.

Scene to watch for: The attack of the flying saucer heat ray on the fleeing scientists. See if you can spot Cal and Ruth's amazing self-drying capabilities.

Best line: "Mute-ant."

Things that make you go "Huh?": Did they have a science consultant on call?